THE VICTIM: AN AWFUL PRICE TO PAY

Malcolm Moran, New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Kate McEwen missed classes again Thursday.

After the physical punishment she endured early last Sunday morning, it remains unclear whether she will ever return. As athletic department officials at the University of Nebraska attempt to assure McEwen's family that she can live safely here again, the member of the women's basketball team remains the school's most visible absentee.

It is painful to have to write her name.

But her picture has already appeared here on television and in newspapers, and her name has been transmitted from coast to coast. This is why: According to a police report and the word of witnesses, she was thrown to the floor of a bathroom and dragged down three flights of stairs to the entry of an apartment complex by Lawrence Phillips, her former boyfriend and a gifted but troubled running back for the Nebraska football team.

Phillips' plea of innocence to misdemeanor assault charges has been his only public comment. He has not explained how he snapped, or why, in what has become the most dangerous in a series of flashpoints that preceded his arrival in Nebraska. With a Heisman Trophy not far from his grasp and the riches of the National Football League as close as one season away, he still could not help himself. Which is why Lawrence Phillips cannot play football here anymore.

If the outcome of a trial is consistent with the evidence, and none of it has been disputed, Phillips will have transformed what should have been the most inspiring of achievements--the hard-earned rise from a fractured adolescence that landed him in a group home--into a university's embarrassing mistake.

At the end of a summer in which the Simpson trial has continued to link the word "Heisman" with the phrase "domestic violence" each day, it has become chillingly clear that Phillips did not buy into the system as much as the system bought into him.

Several weeks ago, when Phillips quietly discussed the progress he felt he had made, he appeared thoughtful, perceptive and revealing. "Be able to walk away from your instincts," he said. The sincere hope was that a survivor had found a new way to survive. His former girlfriend has reason to believe he still doesn't get it.

His presence represents the inherent conflict of major-college athletics. Universities exist to provide opportunities, but coaches forfeit any credibility in that discussion because they are paid to find players, and superior talent becomes the rationalization for too great a risk. Nebraska's mistake does not have to become a failure. The university should take responsibility for Phillips because it long ago committed to the risk, as it has since Johnny Rodgers won the 1972 Heisman despite an earlier involvement in a gas station robbery.

Nebraska can allow him to stay in school without sending him across the country to represent the university. The process leading to his eventual return may have begun when his "dismissal" from the team was subtly altered to an "indefinite suspension."

The university can make every student realize that its commitment to zero tolerance can even mean the dismissal of a potential Heisman winner from the team.

"There are women who feel that finally there are some consequences that are going out publicly," said Judith Kriss, director of the university's women's center. "We may well have students who are in abusive relationships come forward and say: `I don't want to put up with it anymore. What do I do?' "

If the price of that abuse is made clear, if this public case serves to break the barriers of isolation that victims often feel, Kate McEwen's undeserved role would have a far greater lasting effect on the University of Nebraska than anything Lawrence Phillips ever accomplished on a Saturday afternoon.